21-Story Midtown Building To Be Demolished For Skyscraper

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — A 720-foot skyscraper will soon rise on a busy Midtown block — but owners must first tear down the office building that has stood there for nearly a century, plans show.

The 21-story building at 989 Sixth Ave. was built in 1924, between West 36th and 37th streets. In 2007, developers Isaac Chetrit and Ray Yadidi reportedly spent $49 million to purchase it, along with the adjacent empty lot at 991 Sixth Ave.

In the ensuing years, the site has sat largely untouched. The 22-unit office building housed the Bead Center, an emporium for beads and string, on its ground floor, while the next-door lot was converted into a temporary "Herald Square District Shopping Court."

In 2016, The Real Deal reported that Chetrit and Yadidi had enlisted architects Kohn Pedersen Fox to design an 80-story skyscraper for the site, but those plans never came to fruition.

But last week, Chetrit and Yadidi filed plans to demolish the building at 689. On the same day, they submitted documents calling for a new 68-story building on the block, with an address of 100 West 37th St.

The new tower will be mostly residential, with 300 apartments spread across nearly 300,000 square feet — plus another 86,800 square feet of commercial space. The listed architect is Damir Sehic of C3D Architecture, a firm whose other projects include residential buildings around Manhattan.

Though the documents only mention the vacant corner lot as a building site, it seems likely to include the mid-block site at 689 Sixth Ave. as well.